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Installing a Mastodon Community on Ubuntu Bionic

Mastodon Overview

Mastodon is an open-source, self-hosted, social media and social networking service. It allows the hosting of your own instances which may have their own code of conduct, terms of service and moderation policies. There is no central server and Mastodon instances are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different instances to interact with each other. The platform provides privacy features allowing users to adjust the privacy settings of each of their posts.

Mastodon provides the possibility to use S3 compatible Object Storage to store media content uploaded to instances, making it flexible and scalable.

As there is no central server, may choose to join or leave an instance according to its policy without actually leaving Mastodon Social Network. Mastodon is a part of Fediverse, allowing users to interact with users on other platforms that support the same protocol for example: PeerTube, Friendica and GNU Social.

When asked enter the domain name or subdomain of the instance. When asked to use Docker choose No. Most of the other values are already pre-filled with the correct settings. Edit them if required for your setup.

To setup Mastodon with Object Storage choose Amazon S3 as service provider and enter the following information for the account. A valid API-Token is required for the configuration with Object Storage.

If everything is running, open a web browser and go to your domain name. You will see the home page of your Mastodon instance:

You can login with the admin account that you have created during the installation to configure additional parameters of your instance, link the instance with another one to join a federated network, create another user account and start sharing posts and photos on your timeline. If configured with Object Storage, all files uploaded to the instance are automatically stored in the Object Storage bucket and embedded in the users timeline: